Greetings From Scott Turner: Get Thee to a Polling Place, Dems Among You!

Here he is again, Scott Turner, graphic designer and pub quizman at Rocky Sullivan's. with his opinion about just about a lot of things, the death of Jim Carroll, today's election and what he thinks about SHoP's design for Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. Scott's weekly post is brought to you by Miss Wit, the t-shirt queen of Red Hook

Greetings Pub Quiz All Rebels Rockers…

A lot to plow through here. We'll do it with a laser-like surgical precision.

Okay…we won't. That's never gonna happen here.

Let's start with an end — Jim Carroll, RIP. The author of the seminal junkie LES tome The Basketball Diaries
was where it was at in the late '70s/early '80s. Dopey bloggers and
obit desk scribes will try to contort a lead paragraph out of Carroll's
punk-rock hit "People Who Died." Good luck with that. Carroll
avoided twisty contortions during a life full of them. He was
straight-forward, straight-ahead, and crafted a harrowing tale that
sounded like it was your best friend from long ago calling and saying
"hey, I've gotta tell you about all this stuff I've been through."
Like Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls and Easter Rising, The Basketball Diaries
cut through the romantic crap of young lives running off the rails and
told the truth. Truth being a currency always in short supply…then,
now, always.

Jim Carroll — one of the few poet/punkrawkers that didn't blow

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Today, Tuesday the 15th, is Primary Day. If you're a Dem in NYC, here're our suggestions:
Mayor: Tony Avella
Public Advocate: Norman Siegel
Comptroller: nobody
33rd District City Council, Brooklyn: Ken Diamondstone or Ken Baer
35th District City Council, Brooklyn: Letitia James
36th District City Council, Brooklyn: Mark Winston Griffith
39th District City Council, Brooklyn: Josh Skaller

There're
races all over the city. These are the ones I know. Get thee to a
polling place, Dems among you! And remember, New York City has voting
machines that tabulated the Most Valuable Warrior race in the early days of Valhalla — the Norse afterworld, not the Westchester bedroom
community. You know what? They're clunky, metallic and really, really
yesteryear — but they mostly work fine, and they're not made by
Diebold.

These machines remember those halcyon days when "chad" meant an African country.

When
I was a kid, it was fun going in with my mom, pulling the huge lever
once to close the curtain, and again to register the vote. The big
stop/go lights atop the booth letting everyone know if the booth was
occupied or empty — though the open or closed curtain did the same
trick. The little tabs that register votes and the enamel-painted Xs
that appear make each vote feel weighty, substantive and, goldurnit,
righteous. And this coming from a fella who, now a grumpy ol'
curmudgeon, sees but limited possibilities in the current electoral
system in this city (Mayor Richie Rich buying the election) and the country (a two-party is closer to a one-party state than it is to true democracy).

Still, these big ol' clunkers scratching the gym floors in schools
across the city are cool. If you're a Dem, take one for a test-drive
today.

* * * * * * * *

When you're back home, feeling
fine about participating in our city's democratic process, acquire by
your normal modern-day music-acquisition procedures the new Michael Franti & Spearhead album All Rebel Rockers.

Holy crow, is this thing good. Franti joins Green Day's Billy Joe Armstrong
in getting a very simple fact — new president, okay, but all the old
battles still need to be waged. In fact, the battles are getting
tougher with ginned-up tea-bag Becktallions chafing under the loss of
the entitlements they've enjoyed — or been told they were enjoying by
the people who really were — these last three centuries.

All that's fine, but discussing it on a record album is wearying if
you can't dance to it one minute, make-out to it the next. Franti and
Spearhead have that all covered. Yes, the hit single "Say Hey, I Love
You" is either (check one) joyous or annoying, depending on your frame
of mind. But the best, catchiest, infectious hit singles all are. So
there's that. Too bad this hot sunshine summer hit was released in
time to gain steam in the autumn leaves. That's why record companies
are going the way of the dinosaur.

Anyway, treat yourself to a post-election treat — All Rebel Rockers. It'll be playing in the background at the Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz this Thursday evening.

Pump ya fist say yeah get down I love you roots rock all purpose all slogan all soul all day and all night…

* * * * * * * *

Okay.

If someone kept hitting you in the face, you wouldn't just stand there and take it. Right?

Right?!

Okay. Then why is Brooklyn taking it on the chin time and again from Bruce Ratner?

The
latest palooka jabs come via the Atlantic Yards arena's new designs.
Ratner's newest "make me look credible" dupes are the boutique
architecture firm (translation: designing for buildings you and I will
never see the inside of) SHoP. The spelling alone tells you they're way
more edgy and smart than you, dude.

Here's what they came up with:

…complete
with the annoying, self-absorbed architectspeak that spilled out
alongside the drawings. We'll spare you the myriad pretentiousness. A
little dab'll do you with this stuff:

The
building consists of three separate but woven bands. The first engages
the ground where the weathered steel exterior rises and lowers to
create a sense of visual transparency, transitioning into a grand civic
gesture the cantilevers out into a spectacular canopy at the corner of
Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues.

What, nothing about SHoP's designs curing AIDS and getting pigs'a'flyin'? How genuine and low-key.

It gets worse. SHoP's Gregg Pasquarelli talks about his tasteless partnership with Bruce Ratner in a Q&A with the New York Observer.

The
folded arms intersect with the surrounding community in a laticework of
form, function and grand civic integrationary protoformism

Pasquarelli:
"I like Bruce. He’s very intense. He’s very smart, and he’s dealing
with a lot of things at one time, but I know his heart is really in
making a fabulous design."

His heart is in beating back
community opposition, steamrolling residents, gag orders on people he
does business with, filching $726 million in public money for the
Atlantic Yards project, abusing eminent domain, exploiting peoples'
fears about affordable housing and jobs, and distorting Brooklyn's past
and future as a way to do business.

Fabulous designs? Only as a
residual effect…the moldy, collapsed cherry sliding off the top of a
melted sundae no one wants anymore. Simply fabulous.

Pasquarelli,
on the basic task given SHoP by Ratner: "So where the steel was set—we
didn’t want to start redesigning all the steel, so take the steel where
it is, and just make some really precise small changes and see what you
can do to push the building into the next realm of architecture."

In
other words, this is the same building as the universally-panned
"airplane hangar" offered by Ellerbe Becket a few months ago. Some in
the media (Curbed.com) are taking this as a breathtakingly wonderful new design. It's not. It is, as DDDB's Daniel Goldstein put it, "lipstick on a corrupt pig, window-dressing on a boondoggle.”

Pasquarelli, on signing on to a controversial project: "We gave serious consideration as to whether we wanted to do it."

Yeah,
not so much. If you had, you would've said "no." SHoP is a hot firm in
architectural circles. Whatever the cost of the chaos and hits to
SHoP's reputation (see Gehry,
Frank, Atlantic Yards, face, egg-on), Ratner was able to pay it. Which,
by the way, proves again that Ratner can throw money around when he
wants, then claim poverty when he needs.

SHoP has become part of the problem, checking their community ethics at the bank-vault door.

Pasquarelli,
continuing his rationale for taking the job: "And I think the thing
that convinced us was, after speaking with Bruce, we were convinced he
really wanted to make a great building."

Gawd, you guys
are simps. Or do you just like that cozy feeling of stumbling through
life with blinders on. Ratner is using SHoP the same way he used Frank
Gehry — to gain some credible traction for the Atlantic Yards project.
Ratner's track record is clear and predictable — horrible, crass junk
architecture when there's no opposition, and promises of great civic
landmarkable beauty when hackles are raised. Ratner's been building
big edifices for decades, devoid of humanity and beauty. Only when the
wagons need circling, and mallchitecture won't do, does he pluck a
Gehry, SHoP or Renzo Piano off the shelf, the latter for Ratner's weak collaboration with The New York TImes
that's more notable for the number of people who've climbed the outside
of it than it's contributions to the New York City skyline.

For all of SHoP's tender
musings on community, form and the integration of the two, they've
hitched their trendy little wagon to a corporation, Forest City Ratner,
that if you believe SHoP's p.r., is the polar opposite of everything
they stand for. Publicly, at least.

They say
lawyers make the best liars because it's part of the job. In New York,
the same can be said for architects. At least those working for Bruce
Ratner.

SHoP
reimagines Brooklyn — no traffic, street-side parking on Flatbush, an
apparently thirty-foot tall arena, and in the words of Field of Scheme's Neil deMause, the new miracle of "vaportecture" in the background

Pasquarelli,
completing his self-conscious justification for taking the job: "And
even knowing that the project was going to have its critics no matter
what we designed, we felt like it’s our role as New Yorkers to try to
make it as good as we could."

No, Gregg, your role as New Yorkers is to think of New York, not yourselves, your employer and his shareholders.
New York is hurting right now. The economy blows. Bloomberg, the master
capitalist, has failed at maneuvering the city through the Free Market
Rapids — instead, plowing his energy and the city's finances into
stadiums for the Mets, Yankees and Nets instead of the schools,
low-income housing and infrastructure. Never mind failed undertakings like the city's Olympic bid and the Jets' West Side Stadium.

You're aiding and
abetting a project that will harm, not hurt, New York City. You like to
use the word "protoform," the architect's edgy way of saying "the
original design." Ratner's Atlantic Yards is a 21st-century protoform
for abusing the people of this city.

You should think about revisiting what your "role as New Yorkers" is.

Pasquarelli,
on the superblock nature of the Atlantic Yards project: "Over a site
that has that much transportation infrastructure, I think it’s the only
ethical, rational, sustainable thing to do to put density, and
sometimes density requires some superblocks."

The only
"ethical" thing to do is build an urban model that has been dismissed
as an outmoded 1960s model of warehousing people in often dehumanizing
conditions? I bet ol' Gregg and his SHoP cohorts dont' live in
particularly "dense" housing tracts.

"That much transportation
infrastructure" shows how little time SHoP's spent in that part of
Brooklyn. The Atlantic/Pacific station is already at peak
capacity, long past a massive rehab project without any plans to accommodate Ratner's sixteen-skyscraper superblock.

And those are the lowlights of the New York Observer interview.
Pasquarelli also went on to criticize "zoning spread" for limiting his
creativity. For a guy this modern, young and edgy, he sure sounds like
Ratner — old, cantankerous, selfish — a steamroller who won't listen
to anyone not squarely in his corner.

Come to think of it, with a world view like that, SHoP and Ratner are made for each other.

* * * * * * * *

Many have made "separated at birth" comparisons to SHoP's new Atlantic Yards arena designs.

Us too: